Francis Crick

WHAT MAD PURSUIT

A Personal View of Scientific Discovery

Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
Francis Crick is, of course, renowned as the co-discoverer, with James
Watson, of the structure of the DNA molecule. This book is largely
though not exclusively about that discovery.

The first chapter provides a brief outline of Crick's early years, from
birth to the end of the Second World War. By that time he had earned a
not particularly good degree in physics and had worked, during the war,
on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines. When peace came he decided
he wanted to change to biology and this eventually took him to
Cambridge.

From this point the focus of the book shifts to science and the nature
of scientific inquiry, and Crick includes details about his own career
only in so far as these are needed to clarify the issues he was dealing
with. The DNA story occupies Chapters 2 to 8; subsequent chapters
look at the consequences of the discovery, including work on proteins
and the discovery of messenger RNA. In an epilogue, Crick describes the
work he did later, at the Salk Institute in the USA, on the brain.

The book is aimed at both Crick's fellow scientists and the general
public, so there is a fair amount of technical discussion in some of the
chapters; this is amplified in two short appendices. Of course, a vast
amount has been learnt about molecular biology in the two decades that
have elapsed since the book was written, so the main reason for reading
it today is not so much to acquire an understanding of DNA but rather to
see how Crick was led to reach the insights he did. There were plenty of
mistakes and wrong turnings along the way, and Crick shows how these
were inevitable and even at times serendipitous.

Another reason for reading the book is to encounter Crick's ideas
about science in general and biology in particular. Although he insists
that evolution is the key to our understanding of biology, he does not
think that evolutionary arguments help much in guiding biological
research. This is because the details of biology are so complex and so
individualised in particular cases that there is no substitute for
actually investigating them directly. Armchair reasoning can easily lead
one astray. "Theorists in biology should realize that it is extremely
unlikely that they will produce a useful theory … just by having a
bright idea distantly related to what they imagine to be the facts."

This attitude continued to guide Crick when he worked on the brain. He
had little patience with cognitive science. "It has been said, somewhat
unkindly, that any subject that has 'science' in its title is unlikely
to be one." Cognitive scientists, Crick says, treat the brain as a black
box, make a theoretical model of the postulated mental processes, and
then test the model by computer simulation to see if it works as
expected. The neglect of neurons, Crick holds, is unjustified. "It is
not usually advantageous to have one hand tied behind one's back when
tackling a very difficult job."

As these quotations will show, Crick wrote well and the book provides a
fascinating insight into the thinking of one of the foremost
scientific minds of the twentieth century.